Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business Section. Investors climb back on the bus Monday after the troubling news Friday that job growth slowed sharply in May to just 138,000, an unexpectedly lackluster figure that raises concerns about the labor market -- but probably not enough to derail an expected Federal Reserve interest rate hike this month. The unemployment rate ticked down a tenth of a percentage point to 4.3%, the lowest since 2001. Totally awesome: Marketing and design professionals will gather in Los Angeles this week for "PromaxBDA: The Conference 2017," which promises to be "100% awesome." The event will run through Thursday at the J.W. Marriott Hotel.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) believes in incorporating artificial intelligence in its decision-making process, a senior official told CNBC. The 68 year-old military alliance is committed to exploring technological advancements, with effective mobilization of data and human capital among its key areas of focus, said General Denis Mercier, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Transformation. Speaking on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue over the weekend, an annual gathering of defense ministers, Mercier said NATO "needs to develop a better big data approach, cloud-like architectures and make an extensive use of AI."

Palmer Luckey, co-founder of Oculus, has revealed that he is working on a new startup that will develop virtual border wall technology. Luckey confirmed as much to The New York Times, which reported that he is in the early stages of building a platform that would automatically watch borders. The system would use a combination of infra-red sensors and LIDAR, the same light-detection gear found in most autonomous cars. The idea would be to use the technology to secure military installations, buildings and in place of a physical border wall. In a statement given to the Times, Luckey lamented the slow pace of innovation in the defense industry, despite the sums of money spent on it. The multi-millionaire is currently bankrolling the business himself, but the paper believes that Palantir's Peter Thiel is interested in investing.

It's general election week, and politicians have only four days left to curry favour before we fill those ballot boxes on June 8th. Between work and everything else, staying on top of the week's developments can be a tall order, so Amazon's tasked Alexa with keeping you informed while you're busy cooking dinner and cleaning up after the kids. You can now bark various commands at your Echo devices (or any other Alexa prison) to catch up on latest news, including "what's the latest with the election/the Conservatives/Theresa May?" You can also surface other info with phrases such as "what is the polling like?" and "who is the leader of X party?" Alexa will tell you about upcoming debates and where to watch them, and keep you up to date as the results are announced in response to questions such as "how many seats do the Liberal Democrats have?"

The graduating computer science students at UC Berkeley had just finished chuckling at a joke about fleets of "Google buses, Facebook shuttles and Uber-copters" lining up to whisk them them to elite jobs in Silicon Valley. The commencement ceremony for a cohort of students who, one professor confided, were worth around $25bn, was a feel-good affair. Until, that is, Gavin Newsom took to the lectern and burst the bubble. The smooth-talking Democrat, and frontrunner to win California's gubernatorial race next year, warned the students that the "plumbing of the world is radically changing". The tech industry that would make them rich, Newsom declared, was also rendering millions of other people's jobs obsolete and fueling enormous disparities in wealth.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who was ousted from the company after making a $100,000 donation to an anti-Hillary Clinton organization last year, seems to have a new project under his wings. Luckey, who sold Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014, is working on a surveillance technology which can be used for monitoring borders and military posts, the New York Times reported Sunday. He is reported to have set up a company for the same purpose, details of which are currently confidential. The company is being funded by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who works as a technology advisor to President Donald Trump. It is based in South California and employs just a "handful of people" including Christopher Dycus, one of Oculus' first employees.

When Chinese Go master Ke Jie was comprehensively defeated by Google's artificial intelligence (AI) program AlphaGo on May 27 in the ancient canal town of Wuzhen, technology watchers around the world had to redraw the timeline in which AI rules the world. The artificial mind had swept all three matches against the world's top player, a feat once thought impossible, given Go's deep complexity compared with previous AI wins, such as in chess or checkers. The event also underscored continued Western dominance in the field of AI. AlphaGo was developed by the American search juggernaut's Deepmind unit, a British firm it acquired in 2014. But China is today nipping at the heels of the United States, long the undisputed leader in AI technology, and may soon be poised to edge ahead as it brings products to market at a quicker pace.

In 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne published a report titled "The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?". The authors examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation, by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier. According to their estimates, about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk. Although the report is specific to the US job market, it is easy to see how this might apply all over the world. We extracted the jobs and the probability of automation from the report and have made it easy to search for your job.

This piece was originally published at Scout.ai. "This is a propaganda machine. It's targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It's a level of social engineering that I've never seen before. They're capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go," said professor Jonathan Albright. Albright, an assistant professor and data scientist at Elon University, started digging into fake news sites after Donald Trump was elected president. Through extensive research and interviews with Albright and other key experts in the field, including Samuel Woolley, Head of Research at Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project, and Martin Moore, Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at Kings College, it became clear to Scout that this phenomenon was about much more than just a few fake news stories. It was a piece of a much bigger and darker puzzle -- a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine being used to manipulate our opinions and behavior to advance specific political agendas. By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) believes in incorporating artificial intelligence in its decision-making process, a senior official told CNBC. The 68 year-old military alliance is committed to exploring technological advancements, with the effective mobilization of data and human capital among the key areas of focus, said General Denis Mercier, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Transformation. Speaking on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue over the weekend, an annual gathering of defense ministers, Mercier said NATO "needs to develop a better big data approach, cloud-like architectures and make an extensive use of AI."